Tiago Sousa
ANGST
Discrepant [CREP81]
Enter, ANGST a series of musical ‘essays on the ephemeral being’ by Portuguese
pianist and composer Tiago Sousa.
After 2015’s Um Piano nas Barricadas (Discrepant, CREP23) Sousa expands his
compositional chops by writing and performing along with a trio made of clarinet,
percussion and vibraphone adding a magical realism aura to the music.
It was fate that the releasing of these compositions would arrive in one of the most
troubled passages of recent memory, just as a new decade begins. If it was already
established that anguish is one of the hallmarks haunting our modern era, these last few years expose this existential feeling with even greater urgency.
The album that Tiago now presents, part angst part nostalgic escapism addresses
this very modern concern as well as other themes dear to the so-called existentialist
thinkers such as Heidegger, Camus or Kierkegaard, who among others, seek to
directly challenge the Being with various concepts such as Repetition, Temporality,
Interiority, Despair…
Throughout the 8 themes here presented, a delicate attempt is made to sketch a
phenomenological cartography through its content and form, loosely describing the
feeling of being launched into the wide world and the discovery of one self. In other
words, the artist’s aim here is to convey the growing pains that the whole question
about the meaning of life throws at us.
In an approach that is difficult to catalogue, the album tries to avoid genres and
crystallizations in which music presents itself as a vehicle to express the ineffable
and the incommunicable, expressing instead a magical world of wonder and
enchantment.
Tracklist:
01 – Overture
02 – the myth of sisyphus
03 – the unbearable lightness of being
04 – quietude
05 – being-towards-death
06 – the lost of one’s self
07 – amor fati
08 – angst is the dizziness of freedom
Recorded, mixed and mastered by André Fernandes at Timbuktu Studios
Composition and piano: Tiago Sousa
Clarinet: Ricardo Ribeiro
Percussion: Baltazar Molina
Vibraphone: Paulo Santo
Artwork: Evan Crankshaw
